On Mon, 22 Jan 1996 charris@uidaho.edu wrote:
>
> Greg Brown is expressing some of the same concerns I came away from
> the last BP meeting with. As a researcher on community development,
> this is NOT an issue of pro or anti-business to me, but one of public subsidy
> of yet another sector of the economy.
>
> The question I will be asking at the next BP meeting
> is a simple one: If the demand for a business park is great enough to build
> one, why isn't the private sector willing to step up and invest in
> it? For example, like the Palouse Mall owners and many other small business
> owners, the Bennetts are willing to finance buildings and other capital
> development across the highway from the BP site, bear those costs, and profit
> from their capital development investments and lease revenues -- so why not
> a business park? On the other hand, why can't these high-tech, small businesses
> provide for their own infrastructure and superstructure needs themselves?
>
> It would appear to come down to a matter of assuming financial risk. Should the
> taxpayers assume the risk that the private sector is now unwilling to take? This
> raises other questions that Greg Burton might research: How successful
> have other business parks in the region been -- in other words, how
> big a risk is it? Aren't there business parks elsewhere funded by
> the private sector -- if not, why not? Why can't the development go
> into the industrial slum that qualifies Moscow for the proposed finance scheme?
>
> As a fiscal conservative, I would want to know the real risks and
> likely benefits of the park, and I would then want to be able to vote on
> it, given that the costs and benefits of this industry subsidy would directly
> affect me -- just as major infrastructure development bonds are debated and
> voted on. To handle it otherwise -- say, the decisionmaking of some unelected
> "nonprofit" (Won't a segment of local businesspeople profit??) council --
> smacks of the very Soviet-style central planning and socialism (i.e.,
> nonrepresentative, governmental intrusion into private enterprise) that
> political and economic conservatives decry.
>
> I will be asking the panel on Thursday to address these concerns.
>
>